I haven't read this book. I'm not going to. Maybe there's something redeeming in here that makes this all a really awesome thing that I'm missing out on. Maybe using blackface as a plot device and -- rumordedly, as I can't find a link and have given up in despondence -- asking your fans to use blackface as a marketing device is totally Not Racist in ways that I can't come up with, try as I might. Maybe white privilege isn't behind the acceptance of this novel and the modest acclaim it's generating. Maybe.

But I seriously doubt it.

I mention this for three reasons.

One, if you had any doubt that racism still exists in this country, here is exhibit A for your perusal. Two, you may all now share with me in a quiet moment of reflection at how much further we have to go and why intersectionality is so important. Three, for those of you out there who are struggling authors in the audience, please note that no matter how badly you write, you have (I presume) not woken up and thought "An entire novel based around blackface! I could do that!" So take heart.

And now, to cheer you up, here is this: Should I Use Blackface? Which is both informative and pleasant to read. Hat-tip to whoever mentioned this in the comments however many months ago. I think it was Will Wildman. (*checks Disqus* It totally was. Yay.)

It's been done. Except it was called Noughts and Crosses and was (and this probably is the point) written by a black woman. And it is, I'm told, very good indeed. I really must read it one day. I did catch a small bit of the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, years ago, and I still remember the lad complaining that all the plasters (that would be Band-Aids to you Americans) were dark colour and stood out on his skin.

***

Re: that image. What really gets me is that someone saw fit to publish such a thing as a JPEG. That's what SVG was invented for.

I'm not an image person, but do you know if ePUB accepts SVG as part of the accepted standard? Because I would guess that might be the reason, since this is also an eBook.

I ran into issues with PNG files in my novel -- ePUB as a standard technically accepts PNG files, but some of the store versions of ePUB don't (some stores have their own versions of ePUB and it can be messy sometimes) and reconverted the PNGs to JPGs.

I believe only the Google Play store did that -- since I check all my versions pretty thoroughly -- and you'll note there are some irritating artifacts from the bad conversion process: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=4LqXLId4mLEC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PT13

I've sent them a version with clean JPG images FOUR TIMES NOW and they simply cannot seem to update the book listing properly, so I finally gave up in weariness. *sigh*

Done well, this book would certainly evoke the kind of thinking and emotion that might make majority people pay more attention to their minority friends and neighbors. Done poorly, it will find itself topping best-seller lists for organizations whose mention would deserve a trigger warning.

From the sounds of the synopsis, and the links provided, it is the second. *facepalm* This is why you have beta readers and editors, is it not? (I also wonder who bought the pitch to decide to distribute the book)

You want to show what racism is like to the privileged race, the aliens show up and then start treating white people exactly how white people have been treating non-white people. And now you can have, "How would you like it if it were done to you?" without having, "The oppressed group is evil and vengeful and just waiting to do to us what we did to them."

Done this way it seems more likely that the idea is to let white racists have a persecution fantasy that validates their beliefs about what those of other skin colors are like and what they will do when no longer kept down.

Even without the horrible dynamics chris the cynic points out, where fiction showing a reversal of the existing race hierarchy just serves to justify white racists' fear and hatred of non-white people (see also: Farnham's Freehold), the terminology of "Pearls" and "Coals" seems racist to me. Why not Pearls and Onyxes, so that both could at least be semiprecious gems? Or Coals and Chalks, if we're going with the common-mineral theme? The way they have it, it gives the impression that people with light skin are inherently more valuable than people with dark skin, and that sucks.

I'm glad to hear there's a good story of a similar shape. The basic premise of 'world in which racism as we know it is inverted' seems like something worth having.

This book, however, is like a caricature. Parody. Satire, maybe? Surely someone just said 'I wonder how much blatant racism I can fit in a book and still get people to claim that it's anti-bigoted?' I was kind of hopeful at first, but the more I read of the linked articles, the more my horror mounted.

In the hands of a much better author, I could see the "coals" vs "pearls" dichotomy working. Maybe the word "coal" was chosen deliberately by the black people of the society to highlight their previous inferior status, and the author was trying to make a point about how the current distopia was built on the bones of a previous distopia. Maybe it's a subsistance society operating so far on the edge of existence that practial items such as coal are prized far beyond gemstones, and the author is trying to say that people in extremes can show levels of cruelty that people in comfort would consider apalling.

But ... that would require a level of competence that I do not see from this author.

Whaaaaaaaaat is this seriously. Did they honestly think blackface is magical sunscreen of magicalness? Did the author never actually do any research for this?

Pet Peeve #1: Author does not research so makes up crap to pretend they did research but the crap they make up is nonsensical. Pet Peeve #2: Author decides they are so up on all the issues that they write about people they obviously know nothing about and ends up using a ridiculously awful amount of terrible stereotypes and calls them characters.

I got about as far as her being all offended that she'd been called a racial slur that wasn't for the right race and I realized the rest of it was going to leave a permanent dent in my desk from my head meeting it too many times.

I've experienced racism first-hand, because ONE TIME someone called me a racial slur that DIDN'T ACTUALLY APPLY TO ME.

SO I DECIDED TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT HOW OPPRESSED WHITE PEOPLE ARE.

LOL forever.

Re: Awards, it's worth noting that there are some "awards" that you have to pay to enter the running. I've been 'invited' to submit my book for a few of those. I don't know if THESE awards are THOSE awards, though.

We may need some pictures of cute kittens or something. I poked around on that Save The Pearls site after dinner and got even sicker than I already was. It's not just Pearls and Coals, it's Pearls, Ambers, Tiger-Eyes, Coals, and Cottons. I mean, I saw her use those words in one of the linked articles, but I was so horrified by the blackface that I failed to notice that each term corresponds to a different distinct racial grouping. F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f.

Noughts and Crosses! Thank you, I was trying to remember the name of that book and drawing a blank. It's several years since I read it, but I remember thinking it was pretty good. Never got around to reading the sequels, though, so I don't know where she went with it.

Yeah, it's really not the idea of "reversed racism" that's inherently offensive, I don't think. But it's tricky to do it right, and by the sound of it, this book was done pretty wrongly.

Another interesting treatment of the theme is Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots, a novel in which the history of the African slave trade is inverted or mirror-image . It's worth noting that the novel is a satire where the language and the invoking of "old plantation" cliches make it hard to remember sometimes which race is which-- but that's kind of the point, of "race" as a social construct rather than a biological fundamental. It's also worth noting that the author is the child of an English mother and an African father, and the novel is something of an attempt to look at both sides of that heritage from both sides of the power dichotomy. Anyway, an interesting book.

As for the whole "she thinks she's ugly but she's really beautiful," that was old when The Twilight Zone and The Munsters did it fifty years ago, but this "Pearls" series seems to add a whole new layer of offensive.

While I'd agree that it's possible to do it well, the fact that racists out here in reality use the narrative that "the scary black people will get us if they get power!" to bolster their racism makes it problematic. (Which isn't to say that people should never write about problematic things! But the more problematic something is, the more care has to go into writing about it to avoid ending up with, well, something like the book under discussion here.)

Now that I'm home from work, I listened to the Mark Reads and daaaaaaaaaamn I thought the author being upset at having a (wrong) racial slur thrown at her and the blackface book promo were the depth of awful. Nope! The book is 100% worse! Why? Because up until I heard the excerpt of the book, everything could be explained by incompetence, lack of thought, and other innocent* things. The excerpt makes me seriously question the author's motives.

I mean, having the protagonist - raised in a world ruled by dark skinned people with serious prejudice against light skinned people - being angered and disgusted by having a dark skinned person touch her isn't absolutely breaking the world building, but it sure as fuck looks like breaking the world building to me. The bit about her imagining a world (she was looking at images from the past) where she was beautiful didn't sound right, either.

I could be being unfair. The author could've just really seriously not thought things through in the way that someone deciding to take a short cut through a mine field that's clearly marked hasn't thought things through, but...

*Which is not to say it was excusable. There's still a difference between stepping on someone's foot and tap dancing on it.

So, wait, now it sounds like the previous ruling class were white racists (pearls being the thing that our society would consider the most valuable) and after they fell from power/were deposed/lost power due to incompetent ruling, all of the remaining cultural groups that came to power said, "Hey, we LOVED all those racist nicknames you used for us so very much that we'll just keep using them to describe ourselves and others. Wassup, my [REDACTED]!"

Considering that our world has had situations where minority groups came to power after decades of oppression and institutionalized racism, one would think this particular Did Not Do The Research could have been avoided.

I loooooooved Noughts and Crosses. Just last year I rediscovered it, and went out and got the sequels I'd never read. They're pretty good. The second one is all right, I really liked the third one, and I haven't read the fourth yet. But the first is phenomenal. I remember reading it right around the time it came out, when I was maybe twelve, and it blew my privileged little white mind. The Band-Aid thing definitely stuck with me - it was the first time I'd considered how systemic racism could pervade the world in such seemingly benign ways, and it really got under my skin (if you'll forgive the pun...).

having the protagonist - raised in a world ruled by dark skinned people with serious prejudice against light skinned people - being angered and disgusted by having a dark skinned person touch her

At first I was like, WTF? I went to the website earlier and saw the video of "Eden" introducing herself and talking about how much she needs to get herself a Coal man so he'll protect her and they'll have kids who'll have a better position in society than she does. Feeling anger and disgust when she gets touched by a dark-skinned person seems incompatible with that goal, to say the least.

Then I watched Mark's video to see the context. And apparently she's so very angered and disgusted by said touching that she blurts out a racial slur that angers every dark-skinned person in the area, provoking a cartoonishly violent response that makes her worry this dark-skinned mob will literally murder her.

But the more problematic something is, the more care has to go into writing about it to avoid ending up with, well, something like the book under discussion here.

This, exactly.

I took a brief look at her site (couldn't make myself read too much of it) and I was not impressed by her writing style. Or the fact that she posts on her blog as "Eden." This is not the sign of an author with a firm grip on her own created world.

And while I don't necessarily have a problem with Significant Names, I did raise my eyebrows over "Eden Newman."

It may actually be self-published. "Sand Dollar Press," the publishing house, has no other books, no other authors, no information on how to submit to them, no postal address of any kind, no names of anyone who edits, owns, or works for it...basically, it's a shiny site full of PR information for "Save the Pearls." Oh, also, they mention their work in film; the author has worked in film. So.

Victoria Foyt is well known for her work as a screenwriter, actress, producer of critically acclaimed independent films, including DAjA vu and Last Summer in the Hamptons. She has appeared on major television and radio outlets, at film festivals around the world, and in many magazines, including Vogue, O at Home, and Town and Country. Her debut novel, The Virtual Life of Lexie Diamond (HarperCollins), a young adult (YA) supernatural mystery, received critical acclaim, including a five-star review from TeensReadToo.com. She established Sand Dollar Press in 2011 to promote YA novels through film-quality, online campaigns. Revealing Eden (Save the Pearls Part One) is her first release, tied to an interactive site: SaveThePearls.com, and a newsfeed.

I'm glad to hear that it *is* self-published, since that decreases the institutionalized Fail that would have had to support this. And now I shall go back to hoping that the "awards" won are the iffy 'pay to enter' contests.

That was my thought, too. All the OMG SEXY ANIMAL TAIL stuff skeezed me out quite a bit. Plus, you know, racism.

I think it was intended to be a mish-mash of Hunger Games dystopia (death), Matched dystopia (sexual politics, I think -- haven't actually READ Matched), and Twilight paranormal. Which is not a BAD idea, but... racism.

That was my thought, too. All the OMG SEXY ANIMAL TAIL stuff skeezed me out quite a bit. Plus, you know, racism.

I think it was intended to be a mish-mash of Hunger Games dystopia (death), Matched dystopia (sexual politics, I think -- haven't actually READ Matched), and Twilight paranormal. Which is not a BAD idea, but... racism.

Ugh.

---

Re: blogging, that at least I can speak to. It's very vogue to blog as a character from your novel now as a marketing device -- I don't know that any readers actually LIKE this, but I've seen other authors do it and I've been told in writing forums that it's what all the cool cats do.

I thought about it myself, but it's not something I can see getting into. My characters aren't "me" and it would feel strange for me to post as them. But different strokes? I dunno.

I don't know if that idea has escaped from the gaming world or if it evolved independently in the writer world (not that there's not a bit of overlap between those two worlds), but even though I think it's a neat thing to do as a gamer, it seems sort of...odd as a writer. I think the difference (to me) is that, as a gamer, it's part of the shared fictional experience. In character reactions to what the GM or the MMO writers have come up with seem more natural than in character reactions to what you as a writer have come up with. The later just feels like it should be in your book/story/movie, I guess.

Really? I haven't come across it before, and it sounds VERY odd to me, as a reader.

Not doubting your word, I mean, just very surprised that it's a thing. Tone indicator = astonishment , not disbelief.

And from the little I read, she's not blogging AS Eden, she's blogging ABOUT Eden. So using Eden's name is confusing: when is she in character, when isn't she, how much of "Eden" is a thinly-veiled "Victoria who got yelled at" .... No, I still think it's odd.

Do people actually care about having Band-Aids that blend in except in a "recognising the existence of many skin tones" way? Would it be bad if the default colour was, say, emerald green and stuck out on everyone? Is it somehow embarrassing to be obviously wearing a Band-Aid?

(I was reading recently about new and improved bandages, and I thought it was odd that one of their improvements was making them in a variety of skin tones. I understand they didn't want to pick one skin tone over others, but why not just make them in a colour that skin doesn't come in?)

And apparently she's so very angered and disgusted by said touching that she blurts out a racial slur that angers every dark-skinned person in the area, provoking a cartoonishly violent response that makes her worry this dark-skinned mob will literally murder her.

And that slur? Is "coal".

COAL.

THIS BOOK.

I DON'T EVEN.

I read this post hours ago, but it only just occurred to me:

Is...is this supposed to be some kind of commentary on reclaiming slurs?

Is...is this supposed to be some kind of commentary on reclaiming slurs?

I don't know what the hell it's supposed to be. All the publicity and such for the book treats "Coal" like it's a value-neutral term for the dominant ethnic group. That's certainly the impression I got from reading the book's own website and the author's blog posts about it - that "Coal" and "Pearl" (and, for Asians and Latinos, "Amber" and "Tiger's Eye" wtfwtfwtf) are just the words everyone in that universe uses.

And then we get this scene where Our Heroine, at her job in some sort of laboratory, is so angry with her black boss for hassling her over some undone work and grabbing her by the lapels of her lab coat that she calls the boss "you damn Coal", and the boss reacts with immediate violence and every dark-skinned co-worker in the area joins in the rage.

Think about that for a minute - a bunch of knowledge workers, who are supposed to belong to the dominant, Privileged, our-looks-are-the-standard-of-beauty social group, hear a subordinate from the lowest social group utter a racial slur against them, and they're so enraged they turn into a violent mob? I am a knowledge worker who belongs to the dominant, Privileged, etc, social group in my society - there is literally no racial slur that even applies to me. That's what being dominant and Privileged means. (And no, "honky" doesn't cut it.)

No, if a bunch of people from Group A can be provoked to enraged violence by a moment of disrespectful behavior from a member of Group B, that suggests Group A isn't actually all that dominant. Just look at the American South, pre-Civil Rights - the wealthy white people at the top of the heap didn't run around shouting racial slurs and beating up blacks who looked at them cockeyed. They didn't need to. Behavior like that was for poor whites who were just a hair's breadth away from the bottom of the heap themselves. I'm trying to imagine a "you damn whitey" scene set in 1930's Alabama, and it just doesn't work in a laboratory with a purely racial "slur" - the lab workers just laugh and Eden gets fired. To make the scene work, I have to replace the lab workers with poor farmers or laborers, and change the slur to something that attacks their class - "you damn cracker", said in front of a white work crew, is something I can easily imagine resulting in mob violence.

In other words, racial slurs simply don't pack any punch unless there's something backing up the implied claim of "I'm better than you". So either the author totally forgot her own worldbuilding here, or the relative dominance of black over white is a very recent development indeed.

@Loquat - Or, despite becoming the culturally dominant and politically dominant power group, we're supposed to believe that black people in this world have barely risen above their animal/brute selves and will revert to that state if given the excuse to do so by being insulted by anyone. Given how much other race fail there is, I would not be surprised if this were the case.

What I can't think of is any explanation for that scene that doesn't break the world building and leave the author's ass showing for all to see. It might be possible to explain away the apparent shattering of the world building (as in the suggestion that the darker skinned people just came to power), but the ass flapping in the wind? There's really no getting around that.

If I had to guess, it feels like one of those "why can't I say [racial term] when all the rappers do?" moments.

The answer, of course, being not so much "because you're white" as "because you're not Marginalized and they are". But I think it's hard to see that when you're not familiar with the concept of privilege; I would assume that the mistaken fallback position is that it's all just about being the "right" skin color.

So pearls can say "pearl" without it being derogatory, but if a coal said "pearl", it would be derogatory because Wrong Skin Color. Except in this case the coals have enough power to get away with derogatory things, and pearls don't.

^^ That's a best guess at the "how come I can't say [term]" when viewed from a total lack of understanding re: Marginalization and Privilege. o.O

Which is why we pasty pink people get sooooo upset in the here and now when some one with darker skin calls us a honky. I mean, if someone were to call me that at the library tomorrow, I just know every pasty pink person around would stand up in my defense and be ready to lay a smack down on them.

In this asshat's fantasies, maybe.

It just doesn't work that way in the real world.

Seriously, all she had to do was try to imagine the scene she was writing with the skin colors in the real world positions. And it's just bizarre that a person with no (possibly less than no) understanding of Marginalization or Privilege would decide to write a book like this. This is one of those cases where even ascribing the best of motives to her leaves her standing there with her ass in the wind.

(Also, if someone called me a honky at work, there's a non zero chance that I would have to fight laughter, even if they were otherwise being an asshat. It's just...not something that happens. There is not a word on the list of "offensive slang for white person" on wikipedia that wouldn't sound absurd. Are there places where they might not sound absurd? Sure. But a semi-professional setting like the scene in the book is not one of those places.)

Ursula K LeGuin used the white-people-are-slaves, black-people-are-masters thing in her stories about Werel, and to great effect. I think that she was able to because a) she knew some shit about anthropology and b) that was long ago and people were more racist, to the point where she could reasonably have expected that people might be significantly more able to identify with characters who shared their skintone, and thus she was introducing white people to marginalization.

(I want to again preface this that anything I'm saying here is absolutely not an attempt to excuse or justify racism, but rather to explore Privilege from the inside-out in the hopes that this may be helpful to someone that they might recognize their own privilege and check it in the future. Racism is racism and Intent Is Not Magic. Just wanted to make that crystal clear.)

I would guess that the thinking goes that in the here and now, being called [White Slur] in an otherwise safe, academic setting would OF COURSE offend all us white people, but we wouldn't turn all murderous over it because our culture values Life. Whereas a dystopia culture where people are dropping dead like flies* wouldn't value Life, and so people would give in to their murderous rage at being called [Slur]. The only difference being that whether or not you ACTED on the Justifiable Murderous Rage would be tempered by your social status.

This is yuck for about 800 different reasons, and -- as you say -- it's a major Hey Look At My Butt! moment for an author, but it smells consistent with institutionalized racism and privilege.

* Pet Peeve: Why is is always a given that dystopias will consider life worthless? If people are dropping over like flies, it seems to me that there's a decent chance that at least ONE dystopia would VALUE life, because otherwise you have extinction. I am going to write this novel, dammit. They'll just value life in completely awful, triggery ways to preserve the whole dystopia thing.

That's a very good question. You'd expect most dystopias to value life even more than the modern world, given that most of them involve serious depopulation. Now a dystopia centered around overpopulation could sensibly not value life, but somehow that got lost in the proliferation of dystopias.

Really, you'd expect there to be a lot of dystopias that valued life horribly - in an assortment of different awful ways. And, of course, one could have a dystopia that was dystopic without any change in the value of life. There are a lot of ways to be horrible to people - death is only one of them.

...

Wait, does the author really think that we white folk would be filled with rage if called a white slur? (Or even a non-white slur.) I... I... I just can't see that. I mean, slurs just don't work that way. That's part of why groups can sometimes reclaim slurs and use them affectionately within the group.

Battlestar Galactica (re-imagined) was a dystopic scenario, IMO, in which life was really valued. They had the board with the number of people in the fleet, updated each time there was a death or a birth. The count was a BIG DEAL. A really, really big deal.

It wasn't exactly presented as a dystopia, but it certainly had loads of dystopic features.

Yeah, I really want to go write me some dystopias now. One project at a time, Ana, one project at a time.

--

One presumes that IF one is the sort of person to be deeply bothered by not being 'allowed' to use [racial slur] when OTHER PEOPLE do (and I have met people who feel this way), then they might be filled with rage at the existence of racial slurs directed at white people.

I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I can sort of imagine it if I sprain my brain a little trying to fit into the mindset.

That's a very good question. You'd expect most dystopias to value life even more than the modern world, given that most of them involve serious depopulation. Now a dystopia centered around overpopulation could sensibly not value life, but somehow that got lost in the proliferation of dystopias.

There's a difference between dystopias and post-apocalyptic stories, where usually, the case is that people only value their own lives. If there's a lot of strife in the world - over resources, ideology, for the lulz, whatever, then they probably won't value life much. And generally, they'll at least value some life. Just not everyone's. Like the Imperium of Man, of the 'Send in the next billion' method of warfare.

I keep thinking the sci-fi world I make when I get done fanficing should be a dystopia, but I waffle about that, since I've never been one for reading dystopic books. Too depressing, you see. Except that one could make a pretty good argument for the Star Wars universe being a dystopia (and I don't mean when it went off the rails with the Yuuzhan Vong and such). And I've enjoyed playing Shadowrun. (There are, in fact, some similarities between Shadowrun and my favorite Star Wars EU novels.) So I don't know.

I've experienced racism first-hand, because ONE TIME someone called me a racial slur that DIDN'T ACTUALLY APPLY TO ME.

Well, to be fair, I've had homophobic slurs yelled at me often enough--once when I was holding hands with my MOTHER on the street--in situations where I thought, "If they get out of the car, my Sleeps With Men card is not going to save my ass," that I have some sympathy for this problem. But somehow I don't think this is the scenario at hand?

Do people actually care about having Band-Aids that blend in except in a "recognising the existence of many skin tones" way? Would it be bad if the default colour was, say, emerald green and stuck out on everyone? Is it somehow embarrassing to be obviously wearing a Band-Aid?

I don't think it's so much embarassing to be wearing one, as ridiculous to be wearing one that's supposed to be 'skin tone', but is clearly nothing even vaguely like your skin. They're meant to blend with Caucasian skin. If you're very dark, they stand out and look rather stupid.

The problem has been somewhat side-tracked by the rise of the cartoon-character or patterned ones, but I think it's still a bit flinchy for many people that something that's meant to be 'skin-tone' is actually 'white skin tone'.

Correct; the existence of incorrectly-hurled-slurs is an example of the Patriarchy Hurts X Too.

For example, curly hair is discriminated against because black people have curly hair, but this also means that some white people experience that prejudice. But that doesn't mean they know ALL ABOUT what it's like to be black; they've just had a taste of hair prejudice.

TW: Group Labeling.

"Cottons" are people with albinism. They're the only rank lower than "pearls".

From one of the links above: "Once, in elementary school, as I stood at the front of the school waiting for my mother, a boy leaned out of the window of a departing bus and hurled a racial slur at me. It wasn’t even the right race for me! But it stung, all the same. With my wildly curly hair and prominent features, I didn’t look like the rest of the blond, blue-eyed girls, and I guess that frightened him. Perhaps because of that one incident, or maybe because I looked different, I never felt beautiful."

The author: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0289439/

I wonder where she went to school that everyone else was blond and blue-eyed? Must have been the same school as Stephanie Meyer.

Why is is always a given that dystopias will consider life worthless? [...] They'll just value life in completely awful, triggery ways to preserve the whole dystopia thing.

Hell, I'll fix this book's dystopia to value life in awful ways right now. TW: Forced Breeding, and anything related to that.

So in the book everyone has to find a breeding partner by a certain cutoff age or they'll be executed, right? And the official rationale for this is that they don't want to spend their limited resources on someone who isn't willing to help further the species. (Which is just plain stupid, since they're killing off people who could be perfectly good workers near the beginning of their most productive years, but anyway...)

Life-valuing version: the society still wants to force (almost) everyone to reproduce, but instead of leaving things to the vagaries of chance they take a DNA sample from everyone at birth and assign people to breed with each other based on whose DNA they think will make the best combinations. People aren't required to marry or even have sex with their assigned breeding partners - medical technology exists, and the Powers That Be are well aware that (a) gays exist, and (b) people tend to be much happier when allowed to pick their own life partners. Criminals/rebels are taken off to prison camps where they can still perform useful work for the good of society and live out full, healthy lives, though they will still be forced to breed and since they're Bad People their children will be taken from them and given to Upstanding Citizens, with priority given to those whose infertility can't be fixed by the existing medical technology, and those whose DNA is so flawed they're not allowed to breed.

And there's several story hooks right there. Teenager finds out she's adopted, and her birth parents were actually rebels. Petty criminal breaks out of jail and tries to find her stolen baby. Protagonist is denied the right to breed because a computer glitch or well-connected enemy made their DNA look excessively flawed. Sperm bank mix-up causes children to be born with undesired genetic traits.

All of which would make for better stories than ZOMG this pretty white girl is so oppressed by mean violent black people!

The problem has been somewhat side-tracked by the rise of the cartoon-character or patterned ones, but I think it's still a bit flinchy for many people that something that's meant to be 'skin-tone' is actually 'white skin tone'.

I wonder if it's possible to make a band-aid that's clear? Or that somehow adapts to the wearer's skin tone... that way, you could have band-aids of all skin tones without needing five (or however many) different lines.

Doesn't the existence of a centralized powerful government preclude post-apocalyptic as a genre, though?

Well... not necessarily. The fairly popular scenario with the last survivors (or most of them) huddled in a dome/underground bunker/starship. A story like this could (and probably would) involve a fairly strong central government that could get up to all kinds of nasty things. Battlestar Galactica is a good example - and while Adama et al. did 'value (human) life' to an extent, Cain certainly went the 'take everything for ourselves, frack everyone else.' method.

That said, there's nothing about a Dystopia that says it has to be a strong central government - it just means 'bad place', you can have a feudal, anarchic, whatever society and it can still be dystopian.

As for the Imperium of Man... that was just kinda random. Though it is a good example of a dystopia without a strong central government - it's feudal.

Note to author-of-book: albinos aren't a race. It's a bit of quirky genetics caused by recessive genes and albinos need not be the children of other albinos, so it'd be pretty hard for them to "go extinct." Also, the presence of Jak Lauren would improve this book immensely.

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One thing I do like, and would happily steal, is the idea of needing some kind of skin cream to protect from the sun. That cream would need to be reapplied daily so plenty of worldbuilding would go into how you get the chemicals in quantity and make it, and over time it would die the skin so that even scrubbed down for indoors people would now be a color... maybe red or violet? What blocks phlebotinum rays? Let's go with violet, I like violet. Everyone would be on a scale of lavender-purple rather than peach-brown, and the standard of beauty would now consider undyed colors ugly because nobody's ever SEEN an undyed human 'cause they'd be dead from the sun. Also rather than dying the hair with something else it'd be easier just to shave and use skin lotion on your bald head. So we'd have bald purple people in an underground city.

Wouldn't a totally-opaque-to-phlebotinum-rays hat be even easier than shaving one's head, though? Especially if the opaque material could be made in flexible cloth form - people could just go around in full-coverage robes. Which could be its own class marker, if there's a massive cost difference between the robes and the skin cream.

the society still wants to force (almost) everyone to reproduce, but instead of leaving things to the vagaries of chance they take a DNA sample from everyone at birth and assign people to breed with each other based on whose DNA they think will make the best combinations. People aren't required to marry or even have sex with their assigned breeding partners - medical technology exist,

THIS. So much. All these futuristic dystopias with all sorts of amazing technology, but pregnancy and birth always follow the same old pattern. Now, maybe this is a resource issue, as in why devote scarce medical and technical support to something that you can get for free-- but old-fashioned reproduction isn't exactly without its costs, either.

And not all of these dystopic societies are resource-poor, either. This was my issue with Bumped: here we have a highly technically advanced and economically well-off society, and nobody seems to be trying to solve the infertility crisis with "test-tube" babies, which we can have now forheavenssake, and the uterine replicator, which can't be more difficult to develop than those personal networks. Is it harder to imitate a uterus than to meddle with people's EYES and BRAINS?

If I read the book as commentary on The Way We Live Now, and the contradictory messages about sex and gender that young girls are exposed to, it makes much more sense.

The adhesive strip can be clear -- these do exist. But the absorbent pad of gauze inside will still show through. The gauze should not be dyed because it needs to absorb blood or other stuff coming out of the wound, and you don't actually want to see that stuff on the pad through the clear tape. My own preference is for the flexible fabric band-aids, which can't be transparent and also don't take printing well. They could come in more interesting colors, but I will probably never get any with Hello Kitty on them like the plastic ones.

Changing gears, there were some overpopulated dystopias in the 1960s and 70s, when people were more concerned about the population explosion (instead of saving all the zyotes). Probably the best known is Soylent Green. In that film, people are crowded into every corner of the city, and euthanasia parlors offer opulent suicide rituals before the dead are *SPOILER* converted to food for the survivors.

I can imagine a scene where ethnic slurs from the lower-privileged to the higher-privileged class were a big deal, but the situations I'm envisioning all require that the system is under stress and the upper group feels insecure and vulnerable. If you used to have total power and now you only have partial power, *that's* when you go overboard responding to a challenge. If you are securely in power it's something of a joke.

There's a play called _Oleanna_ by Mamet which is about interactions between a male professor and a female student. In the first act, he has all the power and for her to insult him would be ludicrous. In the second act, she has gained institutional allies who can ruin his career, and suddenly hearing something like "male sexist pig" from her *would* be very threatening. But it's threatening precisely because she is no longer solidly in the marginalized role.

I hated the production of Oleanna that I saw at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with an intense white-hot passion--one of my least favorite plays ever--because I thought that neither character succeeded in being a person at any point, and the highly stylized dialog made this obtrusively obvious. So I am not recommending it by citing it, but it's the best example I could come up with.

Probably the best known is Soylent Green. In that film, people are crowded into every corner of the city, and euthanasia parlors offer opulent suicide rituals before the dead are *SPOILER* converted to food for the survivors.

I don't think SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE is really a spoiler after being a meme for a few decades...

THIS. So much. All these futuristic dystopias with all sorts of amazing technology, but pregnancy and birth always follow the same old pattern. Now, maybe this is a resource issue, as in why devote scarce medical and technical support to something that you can get for free-- but old-fashioned reproduction isn't exactly without its costs, either.

Maybe they just want to. People do all kinds of inefficient things for no better reason that sheer hatred.

The basic premise of 'world in which racism as we know it is inverted' seems like something worth having.

Well, to plug Ursula LeGuin again (since I haven't in a while, heh) "Four Ways to Forgiveness" is one such. And one of the novellas in "Birthday of the world" is set on the same world. Content notes for blatant sexism as well as racism and slavery apply like whoa, though.

Been done. See Jack Williamson's "The Humanoids" and "The Humanoid Touch" where the human race is completely under the control of androids who were created to protect humans and keep them safe and value human life at all costs. Note that freedom, basic autonomy, dignity and even comfort are not in the priority list.

Sadly, she seems to have grown up in Coral Gables, Florida. I can't find Foyt's age anywhere, or what the ethnic makeup of Coral Gables has been through time, but I am side eyeing her claim that she was the only kid in her grade school that wasn't blond and blue eyed. Let's just say it pegs the needle on my bullshitometer.

THIS. So much. All these futuristic dystopias with all sorts of amazing technology, but pregnancy and birth always follow the same old pattern. Now, maybe this is a resource issue, as in why devote scarce medical and technical support to something that you can get for free-- but old-fashioned reproduction isn't exactly without its costs, either.

Huh, thinking.

"Brave New World", (which I consider a hideously bad book), does completely do away with traditional reproduction, to the point where family relation words are considered obscene and hilarious. (The career of one of the characters is utterly trashed when a young man, raised outside the dystopian community, addresses him with all respect, as "Father".)

"The Giver" apparently does old-fashioned pregnancy, possibly birth, but outsources it to a specifically chosen group, and I'm not sure those women are carrying their biological children. The kids are then raised by selected families. Of course, this is also a society in which sexuality has been completely erased.

It's entirely unclear in "Biting the Sun" where the hell people originally come from, the way they swap bodies out.

Not only does her own site have a slightly different version of the "OMG a racial slur was thrown at me" event, but she's got an awful, awful post on the Huffington Post blog. I don't know what's wrong with Huffington Post's blog site, but it's loading weird on my work computer, but scroll down for rage. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victoria-foyt/white-and-in-the-minority_b_1632207.html

"I'm white, and except for our housekeeper, everyone I knew in my hometown in the Southeast was white. It was a white world with white actors on TV and white models and white teachers and a white president. There were a few Cuban kids in my private high school, but just a few."

In CORAL GABLES!? The only way you didn't known non-white people was if you and your family actively avoided them. Except as servants. How can you not see how bizarre this is!?

She goes on to talk about how, in the future, whites will be in the minority. "However we get there, eventually, the majority will be non-white, and the actors, models, teachers and politicians will reflect the new status quo. Perceptions of beauty also will likely change. Access to jobs and education will probably shift too. And possibly, past cycles of prejudice may replay... with the tables turned? I don't harbor fears that the existing minority races are waiting for the day they can take revenge on whites. I hope that we are as a whole more evolved, and have learned vital lessons during the Civil Rights era. "

WHAT THE FLYING FUCK, LADY? Someone who truly had no concern about color reversed prejudices would not a) bring them up or b) write the fucking racist book you wrote. Also, globaly, white folk are the minority and have been for some time, if not forever. It's not just about ethnicity or skin color, or numbers, it's about money and power.

I wouldn't worry about those awards. None of their websites scream "prefessional". None list their judges, and at least one requires and admittance fee. I suspect it isn't difficult for everyone who applies to get at least "runner up".

I thought it would be interesting to check her out on the IMDB. She's acted in 6 movies (I haven't heard of any of them), written five (five of the six that she's acted in, interestingly) and directed one (which she also wrote and acted in). She hasn't any film credits after 2005.

It's safe to say that, while on American soil, I have never suffered from prejudice. That I haven't a clue what it would be like to be in the minority. That as a white woman who was raised in a white community, I take many social or economic issues for granted.

So, naturally, I thought that writing a book about being an oppressed minority as a white person was the cracker jack thing to do!

...there aren't enough Fs to WT with those quotes. Waugh. I don't really know what to say. I can understand having a racially sheltered upbringing, but usually when you have to go out into the world, you find out that the world won't let you stay sheltered for long.

It would make it easier if they all just made them bright blue. (Like food service ones; it's used because it's going to stick out like a sore thumb if it falls into the food.) But if you HAVE to have bandages that don't show -- like, you cut your arm right before a job interview -- it is salt in the wound to have "flesh" tone that is not and never will be anywhere near your skin color. On a related note, I will know that racism is on the wane the day I can find a bra *anywhere* that actually is my skin color. There are plenty of peachy ones for white people, but unless your skin is the color of black coffee or deep mahogany, *try* finding a bra that doesn't show up under a light-colored shirt. I have to keep my jacket on even in hot rooms because invariably my bra doesn't match my skin and therefore is very obvious.

...huh. I never realized the thing was that the bra had to match the skin. I thought it had to match the clothes (or the clothes had to be opaque.) It makes a lot of sense, and I do own a vaguely-me-colored bra, just because it came two-for-one with black and white and blue ones...

...huh. I never realized the thing was that the bra had to match the skin. I thought it had to match the clothes (or the clothes had to be opaque.) It makes a lot of sense, and I do own a vaguely-me-colored bra, just because it came two-for-one with black and white and blue ones...The blue ones would of course be for Andorians.

This book just sounds very Farnham's Freehold for Girls, or something. Ugh and blech.

TW: Extreme violence, slavery

One book that I think did something like what Farnham's Freehold attempts is Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. There's plenty of problematic stuff (It's Orson Scott Card, people), but I thought it did a decent job of going, "Chattel slavery is a Very Bad Thing, and human sacrifice is a Very Bad Thing, and different people will have different reasons for thinking one Very Bad Thing is The Worst Thing Ever, to the point where stopping it from becoming widespread is worth a fair amount of blowback."

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